Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis/archive1

Image review

• File:Kerameikos,_Athens_-_51036694153.jpg should include an explicit tag for the original work
  • This one's a bit tricky. The gravestones in the image are replicas (plaster casts), and I can find no specific information on when they were made. The Cambridge University Cast Gallery mentions when a few of the originals were moved -- that the Dexileos stele in the image was "in situ until the Second World War" (so 1940 in Greece), for example, which makes it reasonably likely that the first cast was installed at the same time (though it may have been older: it was common for museums to use such casts in the early C20th). In that case it would probably be PD in Greece (as an anonymous work, copyright expires 70 years after publication) but I'm not sure that it would be in the United States (which would need it to have been PD in Greece in 1996, so made prior to 1926, which is possible but unproveable). Even then, we have no way of knowing that these plaster casts are the originals. That would point towards a swap -- unless we say that a plaster cast doesn't meet the US threshold of originality for a new copyright? UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 07:30, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

• File:University_of_California_publications_in_American_archaeology_and_ethnology_(1903)_(14579912297).jpg: is a more specific tag available? Nikkimaria (talk) 05:47, 4 November 2025 (UTC)
  • Published in 1903, so yes -- done. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 07:30, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

• Thanks, Nikkimaria. One straightforwardly done; one where I'd value your thoughts. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 07:30, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

If there is a PD original from which a replica was made, the replica is PD per commons:Commons:Copyright_rules_by_subject_matter#Replicas_of_PD_artworks. Is it known that the original is/was PD? Nikkimaria (talk) 23:55, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

Oh, yes — the originals are over 2000 years old! I’ll link that Commons page – unless there’s a nice template for this purpose? UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 08:18, 5 November 2025 (UTC)

Now done. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 19:34, 5 November 2025 (UTC)

Flyby from RoySmith

I'm not sure this is in-scope for FAC, but I'm wondering if "Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis" is a good title for the article. The problem is, it doesn't give any hint what the topic is. It could be a hypothesis about anything from biblical studies to quantum mechanics. But maybe that's just the nature of titles and I see we have lots like that, so take this for whatever it's worth. RoySmith (talk) 13:09, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

Perhaps. I think the relevant policy here is WP:CONCISION: specifically The goal of concision is to balance brevity with sufficient information to identify the topic to a person familiar with the general subject area. (emphasis mine). So we could have e.g. "Saxe--Goldstein hypothesis (archaeological theory)", but that wouldn't be needed for someone familiar with the general subject area (archaeological theory?), and there's no other S-G hypothesis with which it might be confused. Without wishing to go all WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS, we have plenty of existing FAs with potentially opaque titles: Weise's law, Greek case, Quine–Putnam indispensability argument and WINC (AM), for instance. Did you have a specific suggestion in mind? UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 13:32, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

I have no better suggestion. As a wikipedian, it is my inalienable right to complain about something without actually having a clue how it could be improved :-) RoySmith (talk) 13:43, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

Entering the pattern for a few touch-and-goes...

• The Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis is a middle-range theory... I'd start at the very beginning. The reader at this point doesn't even have a clue what the topic is, so, borrowing some text from Middle-range theory (archaeology) maybe something like "The Saxe-Goldstein hypothesis is a theory in archeology which attempts to link human behavior and natural processes to the physical remains in the archeological record". You could then go on with "As such, it is a middle-range theory ..." You do this better in the lead with the "In archeology ..." introduction, but the body should be able to stand alone.
  • I think this needs to get a bit more complicated, unfortunately, as I'm no longer convinced you can use "middle-range theory" as a countable noun: we need "an example of middle-range theory". Not insurmountable by any means, though: I'll get to this one have now got to this. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 21:02, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

• Saxe developed this hypothesis from the work of Mervyn Meggitt, who found (based on anthropological observations between 1933 and the early 1960s) that the Mae Enga people of Papua New Guinea determined the legitimate ownership of land through claims of lineal descent from ancestors who had once settled it.[9] A rather long and complex sentence that could be split up.
  • I've had a go here, and at simplifying/explaining things. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 21:02, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

• In a 1962 article, Binford had called on archaeologists to make greater use of ethnographic parallels, as Saxe later did it might be worth doing a more chronological thing and mentioning this first, before you get into Saxe's work. There's also an unfortunate repetition of the word "parallel". In the section heading, you're using parallel to mean Saxe and Binford's efforts were going on at the same time. Here you use it in a totally different sense (ethnographic parallels), which might be confusing to readers.

• In a 1971 article titled "Mortuary Practices: Their Study and Their Potential", Binford argued that funerary practices should be understood as reflections of the social organization of the people who carry them out, rather than as consequences of the ancestry of different cultural groups or of contacts between them (the cultural diffusionist or culture-historical model then prevalent in archaeology) another overly-complex sentence.
  • I've had a go here. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 21:02, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

• As a general comment (triggered by the next two immediately following sentences), I think you lean towards these long sentences too much. Periods, when purchased in bulk at the punctuation store, can be had for attractive prices so you can afford to sprinkle them about more liberally than you do.

• You use the term "funerary practices", which I'm sure is the correct term in the scientific literature, but could it be replaced with the more familiar (and thus more accessible to non-expert readers) "funeral practices" without loss of precision? You also talk about "mortuary practice". Is that the same thing as "funerary practice"? If so, then sticking to a single term would reduce confusion. If not, then explain how they differ.
  • "Funerary" is better than "funeral", I think, since it encompasses what's done to "process" the dead body more widely than "funeral", which really refers to a single event. "Mortuary" is broader still: it covers the treatment of the dead, which might include (for example) digging them up and doing things with their remains long after the funeral, continued rituals involving the graves, and so on. I'll have a think on this: it might be simplest just to define the two terms, but there may well be opportunities to clarify the language in places. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 21:02, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

• Binford investigated a sample of 40 societies does that mean he started with 40 and took a sub-sampling of those? If you mean he studied 40 societies, I'd drop the "sample of".
  • More that he investigated 40, which he took to be a representative sample of all societies. For now I've cut as you suggest, but there might be a way to resurrect that somewhat. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 21:02, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

• more and more abstract degrees of differentiation why "more and more" instead of just "more"?
  • There are two comparatives here ("more" and "more abstract"). Not immediately thinking of a good rephrase, but it's been a long day. I'll keep thinking on it; this really ought to be changed. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 21:02, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

• Saxe's Hypothesis 8 was widely adopted MOS:SPELLNUM argues for spelling out "eight", but maybe 8 is standard practice in the literature, in which case I guess that overrides the MOS?
  • I usually see it in figures, but a quick Google finds results for "eight", so I've switched to that. I've generally treated it as a two-word proper noun, but I'm not totally sold on that capitalisation. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 21:02, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

• a corporate group structure I suspect "corporate" is a term of art here, with a meaning distinct from Corporation, in which case a brief explanation would help.

I only skimmed the rest of this. My general comment is that it's a bit dense and probably not as accessible to inexpert lay readers as WP:TECHNICAL would like. Some of it is vocabulary. Terms like funerary, lineal descent, corporate, hypothesis, ethnographic, swidden, megalithic, neolithic, mesolithic, mesoamerican, agency, disjunction, methodological, reductionist, deterministic may not all be hard-core technical terms, but many of them will be unfamiliar to our general readership. This is compounded by an overly academic writing style with long and complex sentences. This would be a much better article if the overall reading level could be brought down a bit. RoySmith (talk) 15:46, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for these, Roy. I think your diagnosis is good: there's a bit of a tension here between the inherently arcane nature of the subject matter, or at least the scholarship on it, and our desire to write for a general audience (from sources which are uniformly written for a specialist one). I've had a look back over Quine–Putnam indispensability argument (as a complete non-mathematician) and I'm going to try to use that as my yardstick: yes, there's some vocabulary there that's indispensible (sorry...) and perhaps opaque ("epistemological", "semantics", "ontological" etc), but overall it does a really good job of explaining most of that vocabulary in context, and the overall flow is clear. It won't be a quick fix but I've made a start above. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 21:02, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

Understood about the vocabulary. Even if we can't get this down to Archeology For Dummies level, hopefully we can move it in that direction. And if you ask nicely, I'm sure the guy who runs the punctuation store will slip you a box of recycled periods still in perfectly usable shape (a little old lady only drove them to grammar school on Sundays) for no charge. RoySmith (talk) 22:58, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

@RoySmith: I've done a bit of work here, mostly focusing on the body, and with particular focus on clarifying the inescapable archaeological jargon. I think the trickiest bit remaining is Lynne Goldstein's big blockquotes, but I'm reluctant to replace those with paraphrases -- yes, readability is important, but it's also important that the article actually contains the precise formulation of what the hypothesis actually is. We go on to explain the upshot of Goldstein's contribution in the "one-way argument" paragraph. Still WIP, but I'd be grateful for a temperature check and any further thoughts at this stage. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 09:38, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

Hi. Just a quick note to acknowledge that I've seen this. I will try to get back here, but can't commit to when. RoySmith (talk) 23:33, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

Well, it's the better part of a week later and I haven't managed to get back here yet. I'm afraid I may have done you a disservice by starting a review which I'm not finding time to carry through to its conclusion. I may still get back here, but I don't want to make any promises I may not be able to deliver on. RoySmith (talk) 14:40, 24 November 2025 (UTC)

Coming back to look at this again...

• Specifically, it argues that societies in which corporate groups (that is, groups of people that share a common identity) legitimize their claims to important, restricted resources by claiming ties to ancestors will be more likely to use formal areas for the disposal of their dead, and that societies using such areas would be more likely to contain such corporate groups.[3] there's got to be some simpler way to say this. I get up to about "by claiming ties" and start to get lost. Maybe:

  The Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis argues that using formal areas to dispose of the dead correlates with certain other cultural features. Specifically, it focuses on corporate groups (people sharing a common identity) which legitimize their claims to restricted resources by claiming ties to ancestors. Societies with these corporate groups will be more likely to use such areas; conversely, societies using such areas would be more likely to contain such corporate groups.[3]

That works: I've added with slight variation. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 10:23, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

As I keep reading, I'm still finding it slow going. I think it's a combination of the unfamiliar vocabulary and the complex sentence structure. Looking at, for example, the three sub-hypotheses, as framed by Goldstein bullet list, I wonder of this complexity is just reflecting Goldstein's original overly-complicated language. For example, she talks about a permanent, specialized, bounded area for the exclusive disposal of their dead. After reading that a few times, I finally realized she's talking about a cemetery. I imagine that to a professional archeologist, "cemetery" is probably not the right word for some reason that makes sense to archeologists. But to much of our intended WP:AUDIENCE, it's a concept they will immediately understand rather than some complicated description they need to carefully parse. I get tht we can't do anything about Goldstein's academic (i.e. obfuscatory) style of writing, but our job here is to take that and make it more accessible to our lay readership. I see you do switch to using the word "cemetery" later on (in the Application section), but I suspect few readers will make it that far.

This bit is quoting Goldstein, and I think that's a good thing (for the reasons I've said above) -- perhaps it could be made more obvious that it is a quotation. The paragraph before is the condensed summary. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 13:49, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

I've finished reading the entire article. Starting with the Application section, I found it much easier going. Part of that may be that by the time I got there, I'd become familiar with the basic concepts and things just fell into place better. But I think that a big part is that in these later sections you've gotten further away from what I earlier called an obfuscatory style of writing. Academics tend to use a very formal style. Some of this is legitimate: fields invent their own terminology to describe specific concepts in an exact and precise way. But I also suspect it's a mix of this being what they're used to seeing in the literature and wanting to impress their mentors, peers, granting agencies, thesis committees, etc. Unfortunately, that often leads to a style of writing which is difficult to understand if you're not already an expert in the field.

I think at this point I get the gist of the hypothesis. Some societies have a concept of inherited wealth (power, stature, etc): "This is my land because it was my father's land, and his father's land before that". And if you're going to base your society around that, what better way to justify those claims of ownership than to bury your dead in a way that makes it easy to identify that inheritance chain, i.e. put them in a special place, and mark the spot with a stone. But it took me a while to get there. And now that I am there, I can go back and re-read the earlier sections with much greater comprehension.

When I review articles, I tend to skip the lead, and indeed that's what I did in this case. Going back and reading it now, I see that a lot of the missing background is covered in the lead. Had I read it first, I suspect I would have had an easier time with the early sections of the main body. But I think the body should be better able to stand on its own as far as comprehensibility by a non-expert reader goes.

Well, anyway, that's it for me. I hope some of this was of use. And, to forestall coordinator queries, I'm going to leave this here rather than offering a binary support/oppose opinion. RoySmith (talk) 16:19, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

Thanks, Roy -- it definitely was. If I'm understanding you above, I think the main "obfuscatory style" bit is Goldstein's own words. I think it's important that we do include those: "scientific" laws are phrased precisely and I don't think we'd be covering the major aspects of the topic, much less giving a comprehensive overview, if the article didn't say exactly how Goldstein phrased the hypothesis (I note that Newton's laws of motion not only has Newton's original wording in English, but transmits it to the reader in the original Latin as well). If you think of specific bits in the early sections that are (still) difficult outside the blockquote, let me know. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 16:57, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

For sure, you want to include her exact words in the quotes. But hopefully you can find a way to turn that into something more accessible in the discussion. Maybe present the quotes and then have some sort of "In more common parlance, what Goldstein refers to as "a permanent, specialized, bounded area for the exclusive disposal of their dead" might be a cemetery". Or, perhaps even better, start out with (roughly), "some societies developed the concept of a dedicated cemetery to bury their dead", and then go on with "Or, as Goldstein described it ...". RoySmith (talk) 18:34, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

Or, perhaps even better, start out with (roughly), "some societies developed the concept of a dedicated cemetery to bury their dead", and then go on with "Or, as Goldstein described it ...". -- this is pretty much what (I thought/think) we have. The paragraph starting Goldstein reframed Saxe's single hypothesis as three related sub-hypotheses... is the "layman's terms" explanation: we then have The three sub-hypotheses, in Goldstein's phrasing, were.... I've done a bit of work to that first paragraph, clarifying "formal disposal areas for the dead" and then using "disposal areas" throughout the paragraph (which is better than "burial areas" or "cemeteries", since some disposal areas are neither). Is that what you meant? UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 18:50, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

Hi Roy, any more to come here? Gog the Mild (talk) 21:14, 21 December 2025 (UTC)

@Gog the Mild no, I've said what I wanted to say. I'm certainly not going to oppose, but this just feels like it's still a little heavy for a typical reader, so I can't get behind an enthusiastic statement of support either. RoySmith (talk) 22:15, 21 December 2025 (UTC)

MSincccc

Lead

• You could link to classical Athens and ancient Rome in the lead.

That's all that I have to say about the lead. More on the article later, if time permits. MSincccc (talk) 14:09, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

Prose (general)

An initial read which pointed out the following errors:

• “Carla Antonnacio” → should be “Carla Antonaccio”
  • Misspelling of the archaeologist’s surname.
• “Criticisms levelled by Morris” → in American English, it should be “leveled"
• “(in particular) American archaeology” → stray parentheses; should be “particularly American archaeology” or “in particular American archaeology” (without both).

MSincccc (talk) 16:52, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

Hi MSincccc: done the two spelling fixes. Not sure about those two links -- they're general topics and the whole of (e.g.) ancient Rome isn't particularly relevant to the specific context of cemeteries and funerals. The passage is pretty dense with blue and I think we'd be in danger of overlinking. The parentheses are intentional rather than stray, and within normal usage in AmerE. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 17:17, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

Application

• “towards” → “toward”
• “north-west Europe” → “northwest Europe”

Reception

• In 2012, André Strauss wrote that the hypothesis was of limited interpretative value for Brazilian sites of the Archaic period, particularly due to the difficulty of precisely defining a "formal disposal area" within the terms of the prediction.
  • Use "interpretive" since the article is written in American English?
• You could link to Stephen Shennan.

Bottom line

• A thorough article and well presented. There isn't really much for me to post here except for a few stylistic revisions, which I'll leave as they are. Congratulations on another high-quality article (despite it being your most technical article yet). Support. MSincccc (talk) 17:50, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

Thanks, MSincccc: done those four. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 08:38, 5 November 2025 (UTC)

Prose

• "a middle-range theory is one which attempts…" → "a middle-range theory that attempts…"

• "model archaeology upon the scientific method" → "model archaeology on the scientific method"

• "centering the agency of material objects" → "centering on the agency of material objects"

"center" in this sense is intransitive and requires "on" to indicate what is being focused on.

• "due both to cultural changes and to methodological difficulties with its study" → "because of both cultural changes and methodological difficulties with its study"

I leave this to you; in American English, "because of" is preferred over "due to" when indicating the cause of a situation.

A few more suggestions above after taking a further look at this article. Cheers. MSincccc (talk) 13:35, 9 November 2025 (UTC)

Hi MSincccc -- I don't know if you saw Tim's review below, but most of the points you raise here are included and have been handled (one way or the other) there. I think all we really have left is the first, which I think would be a step in the wrong direction: it would turn a definition of an unfamiliar term into an opaque use of it. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 14:15, 9 November 2025 (UTC)

@UndercoverClassicist I hadn’t done so before, but I have now. Good luck with your nomination, and I’ll move on to other articles I’m currently working on. MSincccc (talk) 14:55, 9 November 2025 (UTC)

Support from Tim riley

Booking a space for comments to come. I'm too punch-drunk after a first read-through to comment cogently just yet. Tim riley talk 12:36, 8 November 2025 (UTC)

A few minor points, which don't affect my support:

• "a body of theory which sought to bring archaeology closer" – as we're in AmE I'm not sure you have the same leeway as one has in BrE to use "which" interchangeably with "that" in a restrictive clause, here and later in the text. It doesn't bother me but I wonder what an American reviewer would think. I merely mention it.
• "important but archaeologically invisible means of funerary differentiation" – I cannot work out what this means. A word of explanation of what might be both important and yet archaeologically invisible would be helpful
• I noted "crucial" in the lead and main text, and it struck a slightly false note. I grant you that the Chambers Dictionary includes "important" as one of its definitions, but the OED calls this a trivial use. To me "crucial" indicates a crossroads where the path followed will be one of two options (crux, crucis anyone?). I think perhaps "essential" would be preferable.
• "to model archaeology upon the scientific method" – this is the first of six instances of "upon" in the article, and I just wonder what "upon" has got that a plain "on" hasn't, apart from two extra letters.
• "In 1981, Brown described the methods of Saxe and Binford" – I got lost during this sentence, and I think it would be clearer if you moved its last three words to follow "applying".
• "alongside explanations centering the agency of material objects" – is there a preposition missing here – centering on the agency? I don't think I've ever seen the verb used transitively, as if meaning "giving centre stage to".
• "due both to cultural changes and to methodological difficulties with its study" – I'm sure I've bored you before with my old-codgerly contention that "owing to" or "because of" is preferable to "due to" in such uses. Admittedly, using "due to" as a compound preposition is not taboo in AmE, but I am told by an American editor who knows of what he speaks, "Because of" is much better in AmE too".
• In your bibliography it wouldn't, I think, do any harm to give Goldstein's and Kerber's theses their OCLCs (which according to WorldCat are, respectively 3175396 and 1194781816)

That's all from me. The article is widely sourced, with plenty of recent publications on the list, there are ample and appropriate pictures, the structure of the text is cogent and sensible, the prose is well up to UC's usual standard. I think the article meets all the FA criteria. Tim riley talk 10:21, 9 November 2025 (UTC)

• • Thanks, Tim -- much obliged. Cambridge and Mirriam-Webster have heard of "center" as a transitive verb, but this may be specifically AmrE. The rest pretty much straightforwardly done. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 11:37, 9 November 2025 (UTC)

Support from Anne drew

Saxe's formulation

• ...which aimed to model archaeology on the scientific method of the natural sciences. Processual archaeology emphasized... Why is this past tense?
  • This was discussed at PR: the movement and its proponents, largely, are in the past tense. Processual theory influenced the way we do archaeology in important ways, but just about all of the people generally identified as prominent processualists are retired and/or dead, and you don't really find archaeologists today calling themselves processualists -- in the same way you don't find people identifying as Homeric Analysts or Whig historians. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 21:09, 11 November 2025 (UTC)
    • Gotcha, thanks for clarifying. Anne drew (talk · contribs) 21:57, 11 November 2025 (UTC)
• The anthropologist Arthur Saxe, Could drop the 'the' for brevity. There are a few examples of this throughout the article.
  • We could, but this is left to editorial discretion under the MoS, and to me at least reads as more journalistic than encyclopaedic. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 21:09, 11 November 2025 (UTC)
    • I was looking for the relevant MOS guideline! Thanks for linking. You're right, it's fine as is. Anne drew (talk · contribs) 21:57, 11 November 2025 (UTC)
• In a 1962 article, Binford had called on archaeologists to make greater use of ethnographic parallels, as Saxe later did, to draw conclusions about past societies, adapting an earlier comment by the archaeologists Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips to write that "archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing". Consider breaking up this long sentence.
  • Again, we could, but I don't think that it's unclear as written, and breaking at e.g. "He adapted..." would make it less clear that all of this is talking about the same article. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 21:09, 11 November 2025 (UTC)
    • I think it's possible, e.g. In a 1962 article, Binford had called on archaeologists to make greater use of ethnographic parallels, as Saxe later did, to draw conclusions about past societies. In the article, he adapted an earlier comment by the archaeologists Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips, writing that "archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing".
    • Not a critical issue, I just try to be mindful of the readability of our articles, in which sentence length is a key factor. Anne drew (talk · contribs) 21:57, 11 November 2025 (UTC)

Application

• In collaboration with L. P. Gall... Maybe it's obvious, but we should probably say who L. P. Gall is. Another anthropologist presumably?
  • I can't find any information on them other than that they were Saxe's collaborator, and the current framing introduces them in that capacity.
    • Got it, makes sense. Anne drew (talk · contribs) 21:57, 11 November 2025 (UTC)

Reception

• In 2002, William Rathje, Vincent Lamotta, and William Longacre used the Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis as an example of what they called the "black hole" of archaeological explanation, suggesting that its poor fit with burial practices in the contemporary United States illustrated the unwillingness of archaeologists to incorporate observations from their own societies into supposedly general models of human behavior. Long sentence; consider splitting it up. Also I think the "black hole" label needs a bit more explanation.
  • The explanation is the second part of the sentence, which is why I'm reluctant to split: suggesting that its poor fit with burial practices in the contemporary United States illustrated the unwillingness of archaeologists to incorporate observations from their own societies into supposedly general models of human behavior. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 21:09, 11 November 2025 (UTC)
    • Touché, I see why the sentence is structured like this. As a side note, I'm glad this information was included; I was curious about the implications of this hypothesis with regards to contemporary western societies. Anne drew (talk · contribs) 21:57, 11 November 2025 (UTC)

Legacy

• Brown wrote in 2007 that it was the "most enduring accomplishment" of the processual approach to mortuary studies, and that it had remained useful into the present. Slight MOS:NOW issue here with the "into the present". Consider rephrasing to "...and that it remained useful."
  • I think that's a slightly different emphasis/meaning, and we have the date of 2007, so MOS:NOW isn't a problem -- we're talking about the narrative present rather than the literal present, and this sentence will never become outdated. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 21:09, 11 November 2025 (UTC)
    • I still think it's a little strange to refer to 2007 as the present when it would be easy to rephrase to avoid that, but you're right, it's not strictly a Manual of Style issue. Anne drew (talk · contribs) 21:57, 11 November 2025 (UTC)

      We quite often quote people talking about the present of their time -- we wouldn't quote Churchill saying "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." and add (as of 1940). To me, there's a difference between "it has remained useful into the present" and "it remains useful" -- the first is a much more hesitant endorsement, as I read it. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 22:03, 11 November 2025 (UTC)

Review in progress... Anne drew (talk · contribs) 15:53, 11 November 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for these, Anne drew -- replies to your first batch above, and looking forward to the next set. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 21:09, 11 November 2025 (UTC)

After reading through it a couple more times, I'm struggling to come up with anything else. Besides a couple stylistic quibbles (which reasonable people can disagree on), the article reads beautifully and seems to meet all the FA criteria. Nicely done! Anne drew (talk · contribs) 20:47, 12 November 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for these comments -- I really appreciated them, and it's always useful to rethink carefully how an article has gone about things. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 06:56, 13 November 2025 (UTC)

Comments from Mike Christie

I commented at the PR, and have read through the comments above. I am particularly interested in Roy's comments about whether the article is written as clearly as it can be for a non-expert audience. To position my comments I should say that I have had no archaeological training since participating in a dig in my teens, but have had a good deal of exposure to academic archaeology in various ways, so I don't qualify as a naive lay audience.

Re-reading, I think a possible source of difficulty is that the body starts with a definition of the hypothesis. It might sound odd to say this, but I suspect it would be better to delay the definition for a while because understanding it requires two separate strands of information: one is the archaeological terminology, which as Roy says can be a little hard to parse; the other is the sequence of development, from Binford through Saxe and then Goldstein. For example, at the moment the body starts with "The Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis argues that ... societies with these corporate groups are more likely to use such areas; conversely, societies using such areas are more likely to contain corporate groups using ancestral ties in this way." But this statement doesn't include Goldstein's restriction of the hypothesis: she only endorses one of these two directions. Unless I'm misunderstanding the article, this is actually a definition of hypothesis eight.

What would you think of starting the body with a section that gives some background on Binford's related work, and then having a subsection on Saxe that starts with explaining Megitt's work on the Mae Enga? That would give a basis for stating Saxe's formulation, and incidentally would also make it clear that it was an anthrolopogical rather than an archaeological hypothesis. Then cover Goldstein's work, using the existing text of that section (though I did see Roy's comments about the block quotes there and will look at that later). The definitions of Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis, Saxe–Binford program, and Hypothesis Eight would emerge naturally during that sequence. At that point the reader should understand the overall sequence of development of the ideas, and a section summarizing the three terms and their definitions might be titled "Statement of the hypothesis". Such a restructuring might not mean much more than moving the first two paragraphs of "The hypothesis" to after the section on Lynne Goldstein.

I'll read through the whole article and comment, later, but I gather from Roy's comments above that most of his concerns relate to the sections before "Applications" so I wanted to make this suggestion first and see what you think. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:41, 28 November 2025 (UTC)

Hi Mike: I think "The Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis argues that ... societies with these corporate groups are more likely to use such areas; conversely, societies using such areas are more likely to contain corporate groups using ancestral ties in this way." still holds for Goldstein's formulation, with emphasis on more likely rather than certain -- she says that if there are ancestor-using corporate groups, one way they might legitimise their status is through formal disposal areas (and so it's more likely that they'll exist in these societies than in societies without such groups). You're right that she puts much more emphasis on the other direction: if you see formal cemeteries, you can probably infer ancestor-using corporate groups, but if you don't see cemeteries, you can't necessarily say the opposite. Put another way, if there's smoke, there's fire, and if there's fire, there's probably smoke, but even if you can't see the smoke, you can't definitely say nothing's on fire.

If I understand you right: are you essentially suggesting shifting the first two paragraphs of "the hypothesis" to come at the end of the current section, and then reordering so that Megitt comes before Saxe?

My thinking in the current formulation was that it helps to explain what something is before talking about where it came from -- the sooner readers can have a basic grasp of what we're talking about, the better. So I'd expect an article on Einstein's theory of relativity to tell me (roughly) what Einstein says before going into Newton and all the ways that his theories become tricky at very high speeds. On the other hand, I can see an argument that starting with Newton might better allow me to see the negative space, as it were, into which Einstein's theory fits. Have I got you right here? UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 19:49, 28 November 2025 (UTC)

Yes, essentially. Often I would start with a definition in a STEM or STEM-adjacent subject like this, but it's also common to start with a "Background" section. Here that background is the evolution of the hypothesis. The article has to (and does) cover that evolution anyway. If the evolution is covered first, it naturally introduces terminology and concepts that make the statement of the hypothesis easier to understand. If the definition is given first, it has to be done using academic terminology that has not yet been explained. You could get around that by giving a vague and imprecise statement to start with (i.e. the "roughly" in your Einstein example) but personally I don't think that's the best solution. Roy, not sure if you're still watching this, but I'd be interested in your take on this suggestion. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 20:06, 28 November 2025 (UTC)

Yup, still watching, thanks for the ping. I agree with @Mike Christie. You really need to lay the groundwork first and build up to the punchline. To use the example above, nobody teaches physics by presenting relativity and quantum mechanics first, and then saying, "And for the rest of the semester, we'll go back and show you where all that came from". You start with the simple stuff and take that as far as you can. At some point you get to, "But look at the data from this experiment; using what I've taught you so far, it doesn't make any sense, so let me show you a more advanced theory that can explain what's going on here". RoySmith (talk) 21:14, 28 November 2025 (UTC)

OK, I've done that -- so far mostly by moving things around. How are we looking now? UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 21:51, 28 November 2025 (UTC)

That looks good to me. A couple of suggestions:

• The last sentence of "Background" mentions Saxe. I agree with keeping Binford's 1971 article in this section, but that means we're a bit out of sync with the chronology as we have to go back to 1970 for Saxe's dissertation. How about moving this sentence to somewhere in the "Saxe's formulation ..." section, perhaps expanding it slightly to point out the parallels that explain the name? I thought about whether this could be addressed by adding a clause at the end of the sentence in its current position to say why Saxe is included in the name "Saxe-Binford", but that seems needlessly complicated.
• "...Arthur Saxe, then a graduate student...": can we work the date into this sentence somehow? The most recent date given is 1971 which is after Saxe's time as a graduate student.

I gather the blockquotes from Goldstein have been broken up since Roy's comments? I think they are fine as they are. I'll read through the rest of the article when I have a bit more time, later today. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:04, 29 November 2025 (UTC)

Thanks Mike -- both done. Yes, I've broken the blockquotes up since Roy's review -- I think it's an improvement (since each one now has a simplified paraphrase to introduce it), but it does make the visual experience more choppy. I'm chewing over whether it's worth using |source= to add a citation to the bottom of each and break the screen up a bit more. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 14:47, 29 November 2025 (UTC)

FWIW, I agree that the original formatting of the Goldstein quotes was visually better (i.e. less choppy) than what we have now. Perhaps what we need is some (encyclopedic) way to say, "Hey, reader, here's what Goldstein said. Don't get hung up on trying to understand it on the first reading; we're going to dissect it in great detail in the following sections"? RoySmith (talk) 15:15, 29 November 2025 (UTC)

Hm -- not sure how we'd do that without falling foul of e.g. WP:EDITORIALISING or MOS:NOTE. But very happy to take suggestions. It may be we're in a "lesser of two evils" situation -- given a fairly length and fairly opaque bit of academic prose that has to be in the article verbatim, we can either present it all together and sacrifice comprehensibility, or present it in chunks and sacrifice coherency/visual appeal. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 16:34, 29 November 2025 (UTC)

Are there any sources which talk about the complexities of Goldstein's statements? In my imaginary perfect world, Fred Foobar would have written a critique of Goldstein in some academic paper or book, and then we could say, "In Lynn Goldstein's 1976 thesis, she put forth a hypothesis, which was criticized in 19xx by Fred Foobar as being excessively difficult for mere mortals to parse. As stated by Goldstein: ...." I'm being a little silly here, but perhaps there is something like that which we can lean on to fend off the slings and arrows of the Defenders of the MOS? I will point out that the introduction to WP:MOS says Editors should generally follow it, though exceptions may apply. If slavishly following MOS:NOTE is preventing us from presenting the subject matter to our readers in the best way, then we should ignore it. RoySmith (talk) 22:57, 29 November 2025 (UTC)

That would be a good thing. I haven't come across any, and (honestly) wouldn't expect to -- in the world of archaeological theory, Goldstein's level of opacity is probably slightly below average. I've just opened up a random PDF in my "Archaeological theory" folder and been confronted with this:

In contrast to a long scholarly tradition in which the symbol consists of the unity of referent and meaning, our folk model regards symbols as material "containers" that convey tidy "packages" of information. The material/meaning dichotomy is further conflated with folk distinctions between a visible, tangible material world and invisible ideas and feelings ... The effect is a theoretical sleight of hand transmuting methodological materialism into a theoretical materialism in which signs speak for themselves to the degree that we think they are purely material.

We also don't have secondary sources (at least not that I've found) dissecting the individual sub-hypotheses in great detail, or at least in greater detail than we already do with the introductory paragraph that explains the overall thrust and importance of Goldstein's adjustment. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 09:37, 30 November 2025 (UTC)

Support. I've read through the whole article a couple more times, and I think it meets the criteria. I don't think anything has to be done about the organization of the Goldstein's quotes, though if Roy is able to come up with a better approach I'd have no objections. The current approach, splitting the quote to interpolate explanatory text, seems a reasonable way to satisfy the demands of WP:TECHNICAL. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 05:06, 30 November 2025 (UTC)

Source review

Source formatting seems consistent, give or take some IDs which I generally leave to the bots to fix. I'll ask a person I know about whether they know about this topic, since I don't have much expertise in archaeology. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:19, 13 December 2025 (UTC)

Got that input from that person, they didn't see any problems with the sourcing. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 07:47, 21 December 2025 (UTC)

Thanks, Jo-Jo -- are you saying that's a pass, or do you plan to do e.g. some spotchecks? UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 19:39, 21 December 2025 (UTC)

SC

• Link "funerary practices" to funeral? I think 'funerary' is unusual enough for some people to need a link.
• What are "formal areas for the disposal of the dead"? A definition (either in body or fn) would help. I get that the City of London Cemetery and Crematorium would be an example of a 'formal area', but where's the line, archaeologically speaking, between 'formal' and 'informal'?
• Umesh Chattopadhyaya, Matthew C. Velasco or Luca Cherstich worth a red link?
• "phenomena are analysed" -> "phenomena are analyzed"?

That’s my lot! - SchroCat (talk) 17:22, 20 December 2025 (UTC)

Thanks, SchroCat. All done except the redlinks -- I did a quick WP:BEFORE on those in the manner you'd do for an AfD, and can't find anything which would suggest a pass of WP:NPROF at this stage. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 19:42, 21 December 2025 (UTC)

• Support. All good from me. - SchroCat (talk) 19:48, 21 December 2025 (UTC)

Drive-by comment

• "However, it was also described as part of the "theoretical unconscious" of Neolithic archaeologists by James Whitley, and as part of "the realm of archaeological common sense" by Robert Rosenswig, Margaret Briggs, and Marilyn Masson in 2020." I think that inserting 'in 2002' after "James Whitley" would prevent this being read as both statements being made in 2020. Gog the Mild (talk) 21:27, 21 December 2025 (UTC)

  Very true: done. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 21:46, 21 December 2025 (UTC)

• Closing note: This candidate has been promoted, but there may be a delay in bot processing of the close. Please see WP:FAC/ar, and leave the {{featured article candidates}} template in place on the talk page until the bot goes through. Gog the Mild (talk) 22:58, 21 December 2025 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.